Lumbini, June 1 -- Shyam Bahadur Chaudhary from Ward 6 of Omsatiya Rural Municipality, Rupandehi, is busy working on his field. He spends days building ridges and managing irrigation to prepare the land for sowing seeds, yet he has no idea when and how fertiliser will be available.

Desperate, he's ready to farm even without fertiliser. "Whom should I blame for this-need I bother about whose fault it is?" he says. "I don't know if it's the government's failure or the distribution centres'. I'm just a farmer, and I have to plant."

Although he owns six bighas of land, the distributors ask for citizenship documents and hand out a single packet of fertiliser. Therefore, rather than wait and hope for more, he thinks it's better to make do wit...